I stumbled across BTC in 2011 after listening to a podcast: https://omegataupodcast.net/59-bitcoin-a-digital-decentralized-currency/

I even installed bitcoin core on a Windows 2000 machine but didn't fully understand what I was doing, lol. After a week or so, I removed the btc core software, my biggest mistake not to dig deeper.

I eventually bought BTC at the ATH in 2021, it's never too late (I got the BTC for the price I deserve).

losing it all in that boating accident :(

Never done big mistakes yet, never traded, self custofy from the very beginning...even my beginner shitcoiner period has ended well as I finally managed to sell my dirty eth at a better price against BTC than when I bought them.

The only regret I have is having decided back in 2014, to buy a Bitcoin worth 300 USD at that time (Kraken account created, fiat deposit done....), but retracting myself at the last moment cause after all it was my parents money I was gambling at that time as a student... 300 USD was what I got every month to eat and enjoy life so it was a lot to spent in something I didn't quite understand yet

So my advice if you still hesitate as a new comer to buy some/more sats, do it. Take some risks with the money you will not need in the next few years, and study Bitcoin harder to make the pain of the bear markets lighter

What a great topic!

Its funny (or sad) to see so many plebs made the same mistakes...

Trading sounds great but its not easy money ; selling BTC with a 15% profit is a good deal, but only until the next bull run, so you will always regret selling SATS; don't understanding Bitcoin and don't approaching it as a serious business is another popular mistake, that's why education is the best investment

My personal journey has been full of mistakes, I've bought and sell with a small profit; I'm from Venezuela and my mother told me something about Bitcoin back in 2013 and as a good teenager I did not listen to her...

I've bought some shitcoins, that nowadays are not even listed in coingecko...

LIfe and Bitcoin are a learning process

First good step is to realize your own mistakes. And what you just shared are the usual ones that many newbies are doing.

Me personally, I didn't fall into those traps you mentioned, I always stayed on the track (stack sats and don't look into shitcoins). I never lost a single sat. My own mistakes / regrets from the past are:

While Celsius cost me more Sats, I'd say Blockfi. Even though I was able to warn friends and was able to get out before lockup that data breach has lead to a lot more spams and scams. Don't fall for the scams guys!

Probably buying sh$tcoins in 2017. If I'd have simply kept my BTC...

Other mistakes include leverage, hosted mining, & not realizing the superiority of noKYC bitcoin

My biggest mistake was being encouraged to buy bitcoin back in 2012 at a Libertarian Party meeting and not listening. I foolishly thought of it as a scam. I didn't get in until early 2018, just in time for my first bear market.

Everyone gets bitcoin at the price they deserve!

Heard and read about it early, considered innovative and interesting but was too chicken to get in at $1000, it was too expensive for an experiment. Boy I wish I was a better reader. But I still think I would sell at 10,000 or about, not in the wildest dreams I would know that would get to $70K at some point. Oh well, live and learn.

Not realising the true value of bitcoin and spending hundreds of them on the dark web for white powder to shove up my nose.

Now… I have not even 1. And a fucked up septum.

My 2014/2015 Bitcoin interest was squashed by Peter Schiff as I was a gold bug at the time. (sad face emoji)

My biggest regret is going through KYC. Not that I have any issues coming from that as of today, but I wish I could go back and do things differently.

When I orange pill new people nowadays I give them long rants about the risks of KYC so they can be aware of them. I also assist them in using bisq/robosats/peach/lnp2pbot.

A few people I have orange pilled have never touched a CEX and only bought P2P. The went straight for the good deal and skipped the scars thanks to my rants. It makes me happy to see we as a community/society are slowly learning from our experiences and newcomers are able to avoid some of the mistakes we've made in the past.

Started studying computer science in 2010 and got in contact with bitcoin in 2011 through a friend who was day trading them back then. He used to talk about bitcoin all day and how you can get rich quick with it and how he developed a trading bot to make money yada yada..

I think he didn't really understand bitcoin back then and failed to explain to me what it was about (other then getting rich fast) which is why I didn't pay a lot of attention back then.

selling. my very first buy was 0.6 btc for $60. i sold it for about $75, and thought myself pretty savvy for making a nice little profit.

when i finally got into it in earnest i took me a long time, and a hell of a lot more than $60, to get back to that original stack.

i did learn my lesson though, haven't sold a sat since then. never dabbled in shitcoins, or staking, or leverage, but i still cringe when i think about my one and only sale

Getting involved with shitcoins. I didn't truly understand Bitcoin until I read The Bitcoin Standard. Some months after that, FTX collapsed (thankfully I had 95% of my portfolio in cold storage) and that was my final wake-up call. From there, I converted everything into BTC and haven't looked back since.

Not buying in when I first heard about it which was around 2011 and mucking around with shitcoins before understanding Bitcoin.

Mine was not realizing earlier that it was the intersection of most of my interests: anarchism/minarchism, distributed systems, and sound money.

It’s like my life had prepared me for it but it still took too long for me to take a deep dive into it.

Other than giving up on going further in 2011, 2013, and 2014, before finally buying in 2017, not understanding sooner that credit is the money printer, that debt is not real, and you can max out biz credit cards and acquire more bitcoin.

Anyway, the initial mistakes were largely circumstantial: 1) being young -- as a youth, you are more likely to have other people paying your expenses (food, rent, college starting on upper-middle class); 2) too little lack of financial adversity. In my case it was largely due to age and not growing up in poverty; 3) aimlessness in life -- if you have no purpose in life, you will not be driven to understand the truth about your environment and what may stand in your way.

Bitcoin made sense to me 1 year after I had a modest salary with my own finances, which was also 1 year after I built something of (great) substance and had started encountering bizarre things about the fiat world.

I first heard about bitcoin in 2011 listening to the Security Now podcast. I installed bitcoin on a computer but never really did anything. While I was intrigued by bitcoin I didn't learn more about it until 2017. I could have started my learning journey so much earlier. I could have started mining. I've made many other mistakes but this was the biggest one I can think of.

I've lost a year's worth of BTC savings to a CeFi platform trying to earn a yield. On another platform I did an emergency withdrawal and lost 25% instantly from that, but if I hadn't I'd have lost everything. I've also blown my account copy-trading 3 times.

Compass Mining!

A little stroll down bitcoin memory lane

After giving money to Wikileaks for quite a while, I found I couldn't due to the cards blocking. Julian said to donate via Bitcoin (the hornets nest thing) and I looked into doing it this way but didn't follow through...

Didn't DCA.

Trading btc.

Leaving my original BTC in mtgox :(

Spending too much time on twitter / Nostr and stacker news when I should’ve been more creative 😂

That and dismissing btc in 2011 while buying naughties coz it’s slow and clunky!

SHITCOINS! fuck them fucking shitcoins Unit bias made me think i was being smart, when I wasnt

i also remember being hype about bakkt when they started to do stuff in 2017/2018

Not going down the rabbit hole when I first heard about Bitcoin. Took me a couple years to really take a serious look.

Not investing in Bitcoin when it was at $600 and stupidly betting on shitcoins

Trading instead of relaxing and buying when I have the funds.

Buying KYTC bitcoin. Once Bitcoin ATMs were available in my area I bought anonymous, but due to insane regulations almost 99% are gone. Now I'm trying to go non-kyc only with RoboSats and earning it.

I still recommend Relai for absolute beginners in Europe, but from june 2024 even Relai has to use kyc unfortunately. Then it will be a more steep learning curve to buy via RoboSats as your first experience.

1: buying KYC 2: buying shitcoins 3: selling btc 4: not going to Bitcoin meetups earlier 4: not running a full node earlier 5: not learning about Lightning earlier 6: spending too much time listening to philosopher/business types and not enough listening to devs.

I remember around 2013 or so(I don’t remember the date exactly), my father told me , hey pls don’t invest in this scam named bitcoin. (I was kind of a liberarían already for that time). And I told him, yep don’t worry I don’t going to do it. My místake was to dismiss it so quickly, because after I read about it few years later I knew bitcoin was what I was looking in my life.

After a lifetime of scams, tricks, dirty tricks, and damn dirty lying tricks, it took a long time to come around to even the merest hint of a possibility that Bitcoin wasn't a complete outright scam. Still skeptical though, you should be too. Don't trust yada yada zip zap zam

not continuing with mining in 2013

Using leverage

Not sure if it should be classified as a mistake or not, but if I knew it would survive for this long, and increase so much in value, I wouldn't have bought stuff for most of what I mined around the first halving. I was convinced it would quickly be banned in most of the rich countries and lose most of its value (even though I already then understood that it wouldn't stop working if banned). I'm still not completely convinced it won't happen, but since it's such an asymmetrical bet, I'll HODL what remains, maybe try to get a bit more.

That said, I still use one of the expensive things I bought, daily. A good quality device, although I won't tell exactly what due to privacy. So no regrets in the choice of what I bought.

Buying right after ATH, I though as long it went down a bit it was time to buy lol!

Investing in a business using a Bitcoin collateralize loan. The company holding the BTC for the loan went bankrupt and the BTC went bye-bye! 🤦‍♂️

At first I bought altcoins. Idiot ))

Some years ago I tried to be smart and swaped 10% of my btc into a stablecoin to buy lower. As I have learned: timing is not one of my (few) capacities.

while in colleges (2011/12), i had come cross bitcoin in ebay... seen those logos with BTC... but in 2016-2017 , seeing those logos again during my career building was like DejaVu.. i studied lightly n bought 0.5 BTC when it was around $980 and sold all for small profit ... Now im stacking sats like never before n orange pilling as much as i could... 🟠🟣⚡️📖🫡 🐐

my biggest mistake was not playing more coin flip LUL https://lnflip.com?refId=Kmo4DTWwu2mb5rDHWarVHEiwrtZTGDALM64AeXrvgcQMziGgRBibTh5dUpSAWZbKHWFhhJRqKgjC3LExTrwv14ZrTn

Ive made a lot of mistakes but some were very far back. Like I lost some in mt gox. What sticks with me more though is a while before that, the person who first introduced me to bitcoin, when I asked if I should buy some he said he thought it was too high and to wait for it to dip back down. It never did dip back down to a level he felt was acceptable though of course.

But I got in eventually. Much higher though of course than if I just bought when I initially heard of it. Anyway. I stowed some away and I continue to, probably always will continue to. Time passed.. things changed, I dont think about that at all to be honest, I have new problems and new situations.

Right now what weighs heaviest on my mind is just mild regret that I even told some people I had any bitcoin at all. Only because some of my relationships have soured, and I dont want jealousy to get the best of people. I dont have much, but you have to remember average people barely have anything at all. And generally lack the constitution to buckle down and strategically operate toward a better future for themself particularly in the ways that we are. People refuse to save out of spite, cause they feel defeated. Or they spend their money to try to soothe their soul of the stress of their life. Whatever it is, they often feel disdain and resentment when they see someone with more than them, they dont see the person who has gritted their teeth and went without and taken a risk when no one believed in them so they could try to achieve something bigger. They just see you as selfish or underserving or something.